[CSMastermind]

Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.

Really needs to be studied.

It's like they started making structural decisions a decade ago that are now overwhelming their ability to deliver basic functionality.

I realize there were always problems like this, I live through Windows ME, but it does feel qualitatively different now with advertising being forced into the product, performance of no consideration at all, etc.

[ThrowawayB7]

Under Satya Nadella's early leadership, Microsoft eliminated the test role on their engineering teams in 2014, transferring QA responsibilities to developers and detecting issues through telemetry. That's slightly over 10 years ago. Windows 10 was their last version of Windows built with a full test infrastructure in place.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put 2 and 2 together.

[samiv]

In summary because:

  - They're beholden to Wall Street and stock price is the only relevant metric.
  - They've been laying off staff even up to senior/principal engineering levels. 
  - Shifting towards vibe coding instead of engineering.

Gonna get a lot worse still and things will continue to deteriorate until Wall Street picks up on the issues and thinks it'll start hurting their next quarter results. (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)

[throwup238]

> (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)

Azure will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Their stock price has depended on it since Cloud and AI got restructured into a single department (it was Nadella's baby before he became CEO), and Azure was already pretty bad before vibe coding entered the picture.

[Chris_Newton]

Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.

Has it really, though? Or has it just shifted its corporate priorities away from its traditional stalwarts of Windows and Office, but in doing so caused disruption to users that had bet on the eternal stability of Microsoft’s product line? I don’t like the current direction of Windows any more than the next guy, and personally I’ve made other choices in recent years, but as a general principle, I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere.

IMHO, a deeper problem here is that we collectively allowed a near-monopoly culture to develop around desktop operating systems and basic business software. Instead of having a healthy degree of competition between providers and using standardisation to ensure interoperability and portability of our data, we’ve ended up in a “too big to fail” situation where many users have all their eggs in one basket and that basket has a rapidly growing hole in the bottom and looks like it’s going to fail anyway.

There are also reasonable arguments to be made about length of support for products already sold, forced obsolescence and ratcheting “upgrades”, where possibly the actions of some providers in the market are exploitative in ways we should not allow, and therefore regulating to prevent the undesirable behaviours might be in the public interest.

Ultimately, I think a combination of restricting customer-hostile practices while also encouraging a healthy degree of competition and interoperability in important markets would be best for the users and fair to the developers. Sadly, right now, we have neither of those things, and that’s how we get Windows 11, the mobile device duopoly, numerous examples of products or services being locked down against their users’ interests, online services that people increasingly rely on for fundamental aspects of their normal lives and yet that have little real obligation to those people in return, and assorted other ills of the 21st century tech landscape.

[hobofan]

> I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere

Market forces aren't pushing it elsewhere. The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office. If those would not exist nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.

By letting their guard down on those fronts and letting Windows and Office degrade more and more, they are exposing themselves to the risk that someone ends up building a competitive company filling those niches and people risk the switching cost in order to get away from ever increasing Office 365 subscription costs.

[marginalia_nu]

There's not really not much more room for Microsoft's consumer software to grow, but the next quarterly report must show black numbers, so the only way to stay profitable is to produce software in a way that is cheaper than the previous month.

Incidentally, neither a rigorous quality control process, nor a team of experienced engineers is particularly cheap.

[joelthelion]

Growth mindset can be such a cancer. Many mature businesses don't need to grow and are perfectly fine as they are. You could continue running them forever, making steady cash. Or you could enshittify them, make slightly more money for 3 years, and get overtaken by competitors, all the while pissing everyone off and wasting billions of dollars.

[niyazpk]

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon ...

[lostlogin]

> Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years

Sort of matching the decline of Intel too.

[marginalia_nu]

Intel was resting on their laurels throughout most of the 2010s, while AMD floundered and couldn't catch up. By the time AMD got their shit together with Ryzen, Intel had all but been defeated by their own complacency.

[dgxyz]

All products seem to decline the moment the revenue model switches to monthly recurring. This is always contrary to the promise that they won't and that money will be invested in product improvements.

If you think it's bad now wait until they consolidate the rental PC market (Bezos and Nadella are all over that)

[AlienRobot]

That does seem strange now that you mention it.

[1718627440]

Because they are no longer competing with their own previous version. This means they only compete with the other crap, or don't care because they are a monopoly.

[Root_Denied]

It seems like that decline will continue until it affects their stock prices. There's effectively a bunch of perverse incentives at the decision making level in all major companies right now that disconnects them from customer/end users. Until that fundamental issue is fixed the enshittification will continue.

[input_sh]

According to their latest annual report, Windows earns them less than half as much as Office and less than a quarter of what they make by selling server products.

They haven't made their money from selling Windows for a very long time, these types of mistakes are gonna have precisely 0 impact on their stock price.

[direwolf20]

By the time the decline affects the stock prices — it won't, since dollars will devalue faster than Microsoft shares — it will be too late as all institutional memory of how to make good products will have been lost.

[rr808]

Depends what you mean by Microsoft. Azure is its biggest division. OpenAI stake is its most important. I think xbox/gaming has more revenue than Windows now. Even LinkedIn is a huge part of the company.

[ThatMedicIsASpy]

The Xbox name committee moved to Windows. Maybe they are shuffling the names their internal tools and documentation as well.